Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [61]
But at the same time, it wasn’t quite that either.
The situation was more paradoxical than this anecdote might suggest.
What made things complicated, devilishly complicated, was that my parents were also proud and that this desire to break, to have nothing to do with the “Covenant” of old, this systematic shedding of their Judaism, their way of saying “poor fellow” about a traditional Jew, lost in his superstitions, or their blank incomprehension when confronted with the “return” announced by Testament de Dieu, strangely enough went hand in hand in their case with a stony contempt for anyone they included in the universally damning category of “shameful Jews.”
Who were these shameful Jews?
They were Jews who lowered their voice at table when they spoke the word Jewish.
They were Jews who had changed their names during the Resistance and kept their new names after the war.
There was a pharmacist, a cousin of Jacques Derrida, whom I mentioned in Comédie and who tried to be stylish with his overstarched white shirts, his sons in the Polo Club, and his overemphatic way of saying “Madame Baroness” to one of our neighbors.
They were families in which you had to have your first dinner jacket at the age of fifteen.
They were those Jews who were so well brought up that they would never say or do anything that could possibly lead their friends into the bad taste of making an anti-Semitic remark.
And even in our family there was one character who was the archetype of all that, the real symptom of the illness, a sort of living proof or living stigma of the recurrence, the omnipresence of that Jewish shame. His case would be mentioned indirectly and with a heavy helping of innuendo. He was my father’s older brother, Armand Lévy.
Poor Uncle Armand!
I don’t know how true it was, but my father said that during the 1930s he was a soldier in the Croix-de-Feu.*
He blamed him for having inveigled his way into it, during the war, in a village in the Cannes hinterland, instead of fighting against the Nazis, as he himself had done.
At the Liberation he had married a blonde with milky-white skin, Paule de X, who was his entry ticket to the France of grand old names. He forced us, his nephews, to speak to her using the formal “vous” form. She wasn’t particularly beautiful or especially interesting. And my father always insinuated that Armand had chosen her only in order to join his surname to hers and, like the pharmacist, to make himself more stylish.
Since misfortunes never come singly and since his melancholic wife never, as he put it, “gave him any children,” there was a sort of tacit understanding that he would take my brother and me out some Sundays. He took us to places like the Cercle interallié,† the Polo Club, the Bois de Boulogne, at the mere mention of which my father would give a smile in which his commiseration and disdain clearly also mingled with a certain concern at the idea of the “bad influence” this “shameful Jew” would have on his two sons …
If I praised the stained-glass windows in the Cathedral of Chartres after a school trip, this had to be Armand’s influence.
If I merely expressed the desire, instead of studying, to attend a “surprise party” at the house of a friend with a handle